6 New Year’s Resolutions for Marketing Wedding Venues

12 hawthorn creative hospitality marketing 6 New Years Resolutions for Marketing Wedding Venues feature

If you haven’t noticed, we talk a lot about wedding venue marketing. As a hospitality marketing agency, it’s one of the markets we know best. But it’s easy to miss a post of ours every now and then – so we decided to share some of our best nuggets from the last year to help you establish your marketing resolutions, so you’re able to take full advantage of engagement season.

1. Invest in Social Media Ads

With just a small ad spend (and a management fee, if you’d rather we do it) you can reach newly engaged couples in your area and drive them to your weddings page, achieving a towering ROI, like this venue.

Excerpt: “In just the first month of Bluemont Vineyard’s social ad campaign, they saw 24,005 impressions, 4,210 people reached, 210 clicks, and a whopping 31 leads (brides and grooms who filled out the site inquiry form on their website) – all thanks to a $400 ad spend, plus our management fees. All told, the first month saw a whopping 33x return on investment.”

The Full Story: How Social Media Ads Delivered a Massive ROI for This Wedding Venue

2. When it’s Time, Follow These Steps to Nail Your Photo Shoot

High-quality photos are the lifeblood of wedding venue marketing, so we put together a list of things that anyone – even those of us who aren’t professional photographers! – can look for and request to ensure the perfect venue photo shoot.

Excerpt: “If your wedding venue recently had a big renovation, your old photos are looking a little tired, or it’s just been a few years, it may be time to hire a photographer to do an original shoot of your venue. These shots will make your marketing team’s job easier, as they’ll better reflect your property and be specifically composed to portray it in the best light, as opposed to a real event, in which certain elements out of your control. Here are some tips to help the photographer capture the photos that’ll put a punctuation mark on your wedding venue marketing and help you capture bookings.”

The Full Story: 10 Steps to Nailing an Original Venue Photo Shoot for Wedding Venue Marketers

3. Understand Exactly – Down to the Dollar – How Valuable Site Visits Are

Venue tours are valuable – we all know that. They’re almost always a prerequisite to booking, so it’s logical that you should try to drive as many qualified venue tours as possible. But did you know it’s possible to assign a dollar value to those visits, making it easier to determine your marketing spend?

Excerpt: “After answering just four questions, there are a couple of simple calculations you can perform to figure out how to put a dollar value estimate on each step in your sales funnel. From there, you can dive deeper to figure out how different marketing tactics for your wedding venue are performing, based on how qualified those leads are. The result is a simpler, smarter, more informed marketing plan that you can tackle, regardless of how much time you have to devote to marketing.”

The Full Story: How Wedding Venues Can Simply Calculate the Value of a Site Visit Inquiry

4. Make Sure Your Brochure is Worthy of Your Venue

When you have the right kind of wedding brochure, it’s doing a bunch of vital jobs for you – not just showing off pretty pictures of your venue.

Excerpt: “Wedding planning is inherently social. We talk to our friends and family and bounce ideas around regarding the guest list, color scheme, food and beverage, and perhaps most importantly, the venue choice. The wedding brochure can serve as a talking piece and a focus for the couple’s conversations with others – both those who may have attended the venue tour and also those who didn’t. When the bride describes the perfect spot that she’s thinking about saying “I do” at, she’ll be able to tangibly hold it in her hands, pass it to a friend or parents, and bring it alive more fully by pairing her description with your visuals.”

The Full Story: The Five Jobs Your Wedding Brochure Should Be Doing for You

5. Remember: There are Different Kinds of Millennial Brides

There are different kinds of brides and grooms, and different marketing materials that appeal to them. In this piece, we match personas with the ideal marketing tactics.

Excerpt: “Many wedding venue marketers may bemoan the millennial generation with their quick, staccato, and often incomplete requests for information that then require near-instantaneous responses. But there’s also so many new opportunitiesto find and engage with today’s millennial brides. And while no two brides fit perfectly into any one bucket, the three personas we’ve outlined should sound familiar to anyone who has been involved in marketing a wedding venue. (For the record, we say bride, but this could just as easily be the groom.) Here, we share a particular marketing tactic to focus on when trying to reach each persona.”

The Full Story: How to Market to Three Types of Millennial Brides

6. When in Doubt, Use This Scorecard

The marketing tactics on the scorecard linked below total 100 points – if you tally up the ones that you’ve got covered, how close do you get to a perfect score? This is a quick exercise to see where you’re on the right track and where you should spend a little more time.

Excerpt: “Are you confident that you’re doing enough with your wedding venue marketing? We thought through the whole process – from that moment just before the newly engaged couple finds you to the point after the vows have been said, the cake has been cut, and the wedding is over – and took a go at giving you a scorecard to vet your current marketing efforts.”

The Full Story: Wedding Venues: Are You Nailing Your Marketing? Use This Scorecard to Find Out

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